430 FARM MANAGEMENT 



on how much technical knowledge of the business the one 

 who keeps such accounts has. The same road bed is used 

 to carry passengers, mail, express, and freight. In order 

 to determine approximately what it costs to haul a man or a 

 car of coal, a very large part of the cost of railroading must 

 be more or less arbitrarily divided between these items. 

 The same questions arise in all kinds of cost accounting. 



The Tariff Board tried to find the cost of producing 

 wool " at home and abroad." It had an impossible task. 

 The feed that the sheep eats is used in growing both wool 

 and meat, and sheep are only one of a number of enter- 

 prises on most farms. The best the Board could do was 

 to make some very rough guesses at the cost. The cost 

 of producing a pound of pork cannot be exactly deter- 

 mined. If it were determined, change in rainfall, in wages, 

 land values, or any one of a hundred other items would 

 change it next year. 



Every farmer and every business man makes some esti- 

 mates of costs and what things are paying him. Often 

 the estimate is carefully made and is fairly accurate. 

 More frequently, it omits many items of expense and may 

 be far wrong on others. <The object of cost accounting 

 is to aid in arriving at a more accurate estimate^. 



It will be seen that there is little similarity between 

 bookkeeping and cost accounting. All attempts to apply 

 city methods of bookkeeping to farm cost accounting 

 must fail as they always have failed. <The first essential 

 in all cost accounting work is intimate knowledge of the 

 business and good business judgment. 



There are many other kinds of records that are desirable 

 on some farms, such as milk records of individual cows, 

 apple variety records, and other performance records, 

 feeding records, breeding records, crop yields, weather 



